(3)Solid Snake vs (4)Zelda (Legends Bracket) 2018
Ulti's Analysis https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/365/228/5f6.jpg Blizzard got the full brunt of my wrath, but Konami isn't out of the woods here. What those idiots have done to gaming is completely unforgivable, and it wasn't just one dumb decision. Konami literally and intentionally murdered Suikoden, murdered Silent Hill, murdered Castlevania, murdered the Yugioh card game, murdered arcades, and ruthlessly murdered Metal Gear Solid. And for who? For what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko For the unaware, remember Plinko from The Price is Right? Imagine that as a slot machine and you have pachinko machines. Konami decided to kill off all of their gaming franchises to focus on licensed slot machines, largely because Japanese people apparently have a massive gambling problem and spend all of the time and money on the damn things. Which means nothing to you, outside of not getting to play good games from that shitty-ass company anymore. That's the main difference between Konami and Blizzard, and why I'm not writing a 9500 takedown of the former. Blizzard is trash because their games all suck. Konami is trash because their games are almost always good, so them leaving the gaming business for dipshit slot machines was garbage. It's unforgivable, and Solid Snake clearly has the sins of Konami crawling on his back. He has to eat shit twice, because of all the franchises listed, Metal Gear Solid was the only one murdered three different times. One when Hideo Kojima was fired. Once when Metal Gear Solid went full pachinko. And once when this bullshit happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rznqHawp4Oc All that paired with the Zelda boost and Snake's Nintendo support always abandoning him against Nintendo characters made for some very, very bad news for Solid Snake. Had Tails never happened, this would be my favorite call of the contest. I just knew this was coming. Board 8 loves Solid Snake and has developed a habit of anti-voting Zelda characters. You guys tried your best for 15 minutes to save Snake, but it was not to be. After those 15 minutes were up, Zelda slowly and methodically marched her way up to a lead of 350 around midnight. Well, 342 to be exact. Snake fought back overnight, and tied things up as the morning vote showed up. We all kind of assumed Zelda would bury the guy in the morning and that would be that. But miraculously, almost as if Snake knew this was his last shot, Snake started mashing that damn triangle button like he was getting cooked alive in a microwave hallway. This match was pretty much tied all morning, and Snake battled his ass off to try building a lead. But any time he got anything going, Zelda just bitch slapped him. When lunch time hit, Snake just ran out of gas and finally got buried for good. The match stayed between 100 and 200 for the last seven hours of the poll, but I remember watching it and never once feeling like Snake had a chance of winning. 342 puts this in the top 10 of the wire to wire list, but if you look at it this was the one match on there where you never really felt like the losing character had a prayer of winning. There was just too much in Zelda's favor combined with way too much going against Snake here. Snake has had a lot of close non-Noble Nine calls over the years, most of which coming with people blaming the sprite round, but at the end of the day he simply had to kneel at the altar of the Zelda series like everyone else. If I wasn't such a big Zelda fan, I'd be sad about this. But I love the series, so this was great to watch. Zelda deserves all the run she got this year, too. It's about time. Right after Pikachu broke the Noble Nine, Zelda dug its grave. Not long after this match, Zelda and Tifa would combine to bury them for good. The Noble Nine is officially dead. There is no coming back from what happened to them in this contest. The saddest thing of all is something I actually saw ExTha post on Facebook, so shout out to @ExThaNemesis here. Remember Smash Ultimate hype and how great that game would end up being? I do. This video is a huge part of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q05VKcXoT6A (nice job to all the idiots who thought it would be a port, by the way) The best part of that video was Solid Snake -- "everyone is here" -- but then it dawned on me. Nintendo is treating Solid Snake better than Konami ever has. Even worse, Smash Bros Ultimate might be the last game Solid Snake appears in. Bolded for emphasis because let that sink in. That is a really, really big deal. It's also the reason Snake lost. He should have cashed in when he was actually close to Link's level a few years ago, because he is never again coming close to winning a contest. It's unbelievably, incomprehensibly sad. https://media.giphy.com/media/12zQU5hwbRgmMo/giphy.gif Safer777's Analysis This I didn't expected. Snake was the legit Number 2 in this site for a long time, only Link was ahead of him. But man. Okay. Zelda was strong this year. Of course. But beating the possibly Number 2 on this site? Yeah barely but she did it. Okay I know the LOZ series is loved here but seriously? Did BOTW boosted Link, Zelda and Ganondorf that much? I know I like the contests but this is bad. Now you not only have Link beat everyone but Zelda beating everyone too! Where is the fun on that? As for the match. Snake was winning for around 15 minutes at the start. After like 12 hours Snake managed to get ahead for like 2 hours and that was it. Zelda dominated here. Also this is one of the closest wire to wire matches too. This contest has a lot of them at least! This is something I guess. But man. A few people said when Zelda beat Squall that the final would be Link VS Zelda. Of course everyone laughed. But it may happen actually! Don't know what to say. This is unreal. We need to have strong characters that can challenge Link at least. Now? Now Zelda beats everyone too and Link? If he finishes this tournament with a win less than 65% I would be suprised. Also another match when a NN'er lost to a non NN'er obviously. I wonder how many more will lose until the end of the tournament? Also this result makes Squall and Aeris look better at least. So that is something. The prediction was kinda high for Zelda too. Around 25% which may seem low but it actually isn't. Nice for Zelda I guess. Tsunami's Analysis The registered and non-registered voters went different directions on this match, but the registered voter advantage for Snake was too small to overcome Zelda's unregistered support. Again, which one was which surprises me not at all; Snake is probably one of Board 8's favorite Noble Niners, because he was almost as big a surprise member as Crono at the start, he took a while to get his first win against a fellow member, and then once he got off the schneid he almost immediately started pulling off all sorts of crazy upsets against the upper echelon--first beating Sephiroth in the 2006 Battle Royale (our first experience with non-1v1s, so we were unprepared for what LFF could do), then beating Cloud twice in 2008 (the first time admittedly with Sephiroth also in the match, but the second time was relatively clean, only having a Crono as a weight, though you could certainly argue that Link hurts Cloud more than he hurts Snake because swords. And yes, I linked that first match solely because the same LFF allowed Sephiroth to get beaten by Kirby. I will never get tired of that) and beating Seph 1v1 in 2010. All of this was merely a prelude to 2013, when he--and his voice actor!--became the hero of Board 8, fighting valiantly against the Draven menace. And losing, but who cares about that. Point is, we love Snake here. A lot of the Noble Nine, the only ones who really hate seeing them lose are the statheads because the loss is an affront to their expectations. "Link Always Wins" and all that, though honestly we were much quicker to leap to Link's defense when he was in danger than...oh, right, Cloud's embarrassing 2013 loss came against a Gen I Pokémon, so of course Board 8 was on board with that. Of course, Snake wasn't losing to some rallied newcomer. Zelda's only missed two contests, and one of them was CBI, which barely even counts because you look at all of the fighting game characters and you realize that the people creating the bracket seemed to be treating the "Character Battle" name literally. Maybe. Some of the characters in that bracket were just plain weird; I don't know that much about Space Channel 5 but I'm pretty sure that its protagonist's presence runs counter to that assumption. Whatever; I still consider characters who debuted in CBII to have "perfect" records if they haven't missed a contest since then, and no, this wouldn't affect the sanctity of the Noble Nine because no one that debuted there has come close to doing what they did. (It's also more convenient because Lightning's presence in CBVIII set precedence that for a character who debuted after CBI to be considered to have a perfect record, they'd need to make the bracket as soon as their game came out in Japan, and Kingdom Hearts was out in Japan in time for Sora to have theoretically been in every contest.) She's done well in all of them, too; 39.25% against Mega Man in her debut in 2003 (with the hated Wind Waker art, no less); 45.59% against this very same Snake in 2005; 44.73% against Samus in 2006...I'll skip the fourways because she ran into Link in Round 2 one year and Mario in Round 1 in the other. And then a loss to Samus again in 2010 and the close match against Charizard in 2013. Charizard in 2013, barely, Vincent in 2007, and Mega Man X in 2008. That's it for non-Noble Niners she's lost to when not literally sharing a fourway with Link, and the last of them she was still sharing it with Mario. Those are all very high-tier opponents, or at least they were in the years she faced them (Vincent is definitely nowhere near the near-elite he was in the mid-2000s, though he's probably still a decent midcarder.) But there have been plenty of high midcarders who have gotten multiple shots at the Noble Nine and come up empty every time, so why should this be any different? Because of "hentai rallies"? ...No, probably not. That was just a fun meme on the board, explaining why female characters seemed to be overperforming all over the place, but I doubt they really made any difference in any match except for Tifa's win over Mega Man X. Because of Breath of the Wild? Far more likely. But there's something else that can't be ignored, and that's that the Metal Gear series is, sadly, seemingly dead. And I say "sadly" despite having never actually played one of them for myself. It's just not my genre, which saddens me because everything I've heard about them is that the story is amazing and I love games with strong stories. The movie critic Roger Ebert was once criticized for saying that video games weren't art, although he clarified what he meant and it wasn't nearly as bad as what it was made out to be. The Metal Gear Solid games, especially around the time of 4, were also criticized for largely being movies with a bit of gameplay tacked on, due to the large number of unskippable cutscenes. So, uh...why not actually make movies out of them? Give the superhero movies some competition for the summer blockbusters? This should be a no-brainer. But with the rift between Konami and Kojima, it seems unlikely that much of anything will ever get done, since the license for the series still belongs to the former. I honestly didn't even realize that there'd been another Metal Gear spinoff in 2018, nor that there was apparently a board game released here in 2019? That said, even without Kojima's input, Konami could still easily release new Metal Gear Solid games and have them be actually good. Without spoiling any of the twists of MGS V, it's the end of the prequel series and the final scene is set in 1995, the year that the original Metal Gear took place. To me, that just screams "Metal Gear remake" for a hypothetical MGS6, especially since the fact that the Metal Gears got more and more complex with each passing game released means that the technology suddenly takes a massive step backwards between 1984 (MGSV, released in 2015) and 1995 (Metal Gear, released in 1987). Not to mention that pesky bit about the Soviet Union still existing when it didn't in the real 1995, though I think they officially stated that in the Metal Gear timeline, the Soviet Union legitimately doesn't fall during the 1990s (Metal Gear 2 was also released prior to the fall of the Soviet Union and is set in 1999). Updating the MSX2 games to modern hardware seems like it'd be a great idea. Someone get Konami on this. But back to the match at hand: did Snake's series's status really play a part? It honestly might have. Snake lost for good the moment he ran into another Nintendo character, after beating on Square and Sega characters. Nintendo knows how to take care of their flagship franchises, and it shows with their consistently strong performances in these contests. Category:2018 Contest Matches